Excerpt
The Elevation Approach Workbook
IntroductionHi there!
I’m so glad you’ve made the powerful decision to elevate your life.
For most people, this means seeking out activities that align with your personal values and interests. Elevating your life can mean something different for each and every person picking up this book. Perhaps your life is great now. Perhaps you have a career you love and a home you enjoy. Your social life is thriving, and you find time to volunteer at a nonprofit or see friends regularly. For you, maybe elevating your life simply means having more time for the things you love to do or have been curious about doing for a while.
For others, maybe your life is okay, but there’s something missing. You feel like you need to add something else to your routine, make a change that will create more joy, or seek something that will help you feel a sense of purpose. Maybe this something is a new job or a new hobby. Or maybe you want to change your surroundings, buy a new house, or move to a new neighborhood.
Elevating your life might also mean raising your physical or emotional baseline. Maybe you want to get healthier, improve your fitness level, or learn a new sport. Or maybe you just want to feel better—more at peace, more relaxed, and less frazzled or rushed. For me, elevation means living as my best self. When I feel my best, I move with ease from my work and family responsibilities to my hobbies and moments of self-care.
No matter how you define it, what matters is that your definition of elevation is relevant to you and your life. It’s not about meeting other people’s expectations or being the best, the first, the richest, or the most successful. Instead, you want to see how you can create a feeling of peace and contentment within yourself. What makes you breathe more easily? What makes you smile? What makes you feel like everything in your life is running smoothly?
Elevating your life can mean adding to or eliminating things from your plate. It can mean finding more time for or dedicating less time to an activity. It can mean discovering new experiences you had no idea existed. Elevation can come from a series of small steps, big decisions, or unexpected moves. No matter what your path looks like, you can make it happen. I’m here to show you how with the Elevation Approach.
The Elevation Approach is my method for creating work-life harmony. With this workbook, you’ll have a pivotal tool that will help you use the Elevation Approach to make your biggest goals and wildest dreams a reality. As I shared in my book,
The Elevation Approach, I created this four-phase plan to cultivate more of what I loved in life—more creativity, more joy, more flow. It changed my life, and I still use it to work through business challenges, reach personal goals, chase big dreams, and make small wishes come true.
Before developing the Elevation Approach, I already had lots of experience with problem-solving and goal setting. I launched my own business, Buzz Marketing Group, when I was sixteen. From there, I grew my small market research firm into an award-winning marketing agency with dozens of Fortune 500 clients. I was a successful CEO who earned spots on prominent young entrepreneur lists and magazine covers. I had tons of friends across the globe, including business founders and Hollywood celebrities, and even more memorable experiences from travels far and wide. I thought I had achieved that ideal work-life balance. While I dedicated myself to growing Buzz Marketing Group, I also found time to work out regularly at bootcamp classes, took vacations (albeit with laptop and cell phone in hand), and showed up for anyone who asked for my time.
But prioritizing my work-life balance didn’t prevent me from burning out. I often sacrificed too much of my time and energy to satisfy others’ needs or to reach my business goals. I felt like the hard work I put into maintaining my work and personal life wasn’t resulting in the riches of life I’d imagined. Despite trying my hardest, I didn’t have the ability to make my own schedule or do what I truly wanted to do. I didn’t even always have the satisfaction that comes from working hard and doing good work.
After years of constantly working myself to exhaustion and resting only so that I could work even harder, I reached a breaking point. I knew I had to make a change in how I worked and lived. I wanted to figure out how I could juggle work, indulge my creativity, and enjoy my personal time without depleting myself. I wanted to make more room for rest and reflection. I wanted to spend time with family and appear in our photos instead of ducking out of special moments to check my emails or take a work call.
I started with this key shift: I prioritized work-life harmony instead of work-life balance. Next, I developed a system that would help me create work-life harmony. That’s how the Elevation Approach was born. It’s my way of taking action, prioritizing joy and ease, and moving forward with my goals in a fulfilling way. Once I revamped how I allocated my time and energy to my daily responsibilities, my life fell into a blissful rhythm in which I felt at peace, whether I was on vacation, at work, with friends, or at home alone.
If you’ve read my book
The Elevation Approach, you are ready to dive into this workbook and recalibrate the way you conduct your daily life. You’re familiar with what the Elevation Approach offers—what it is, how to use it, and how it’s helped me. This workbook is designed to help you dig deeper into the method you’ve already practiced and give you a dedicated space in which to gather your ideas, thoughts, brainstorms, and moments of clarity and joy.
If you haven’t read the book, don’t worry. I’ll give you a full overview of what the Elevation Approach is, how I’ve used it, and how it can help you elevate your life. You can then use this workbook to gain a head start on putting its principles into action today.
No matter where you’re starting from, I want you to achieve the same work-life harmony in your life that I’ve finally obtained, where the things you do each day take your life to another level. The Elevation Approach is what has helped me achieve that goal in my life, and I hope it can move you toward the work-life harmony that feels good in your own life. All you have to do is stay open and come along with me as we move through the Elevation Approach so that you get closer to the bliss that this harmony brings.
Let me show you the way.
